Well Played
done.Next to me, one of the vendors sighed. I recognized her; she sold tarot cards and crystals out of a booth shaped like a traveling wagon. She leaned over to the woman next to her. “So much pretty on one stage.”
Her companion nodded. “Should be illegal, those legs. Thank God for kilts.”
The tarot card seller sighed again. “Too bad he’s such a manwhore.”
“Really.” The word slipped out before I could check it, and the two women turned to me with a conspiratorial grin. There was that feeling again, of being a Faire insider, with access to the best gossip.
“Oh, yeah.” She leaned a little closer to me, and I did the same, as if she were about to share a secret. “I’m pretty sure he’s got a girl at every Faire.”
“Oh, he does,” the other vendor said. “Wonder who it is here.” She glanced around the audience as though she could identify Dex’s Willow Creek hookup by some kind of secret symbol. A really satisfied smile, maybe. I bit hard on the inside of my cheek. If he was discreet enough to not blab about it, then I would be too.
“No idea,” I said, pleased at how noncommittal my voice sounded.
“Lucky girl, though.” The tarot vendor placed her hands on her belly, as if she were quelling butterflies that had gathered there. “I bet she had a hell of a summer.” She snickered, the other vendor joined in, and I forced myself to do the same, even though my laugh was a little hollow.
At the end of the song the two women slipped out of the crowd and back to their booths. As the next song started, there was a touch on my elbow.
“Good morrow, milady Beatrice.”
My attention slid away from Dex and to a different MacLean altogether. Daniel, Dex’s cousin, managed the Dueling Kilts. He usually lingered somewhere in the back of the crowd like this, dressed in his uniform of a black T-shirt and black jeans. How the man managed to not die of heatstroke dressed like that in the middle of August, I’d never know.
“Well met, good sir.” I bobbed a quick curtsy, still in character. Then I dropped the accent. “Faire’s about over, you know. You can call me Stacey now.”
Daniel’s laugh was a quiet exhale. “I’ll try and remember.” He took off his black baseball cap and shook out his hair, and I was surprised anew at how red it was. Just long enough to fall into his eyes, his hair was usually obscured by the hat he wore all the time. “New necklace?” He raked his hair out of his eyes with one hand before settling the cap back on his head, eclipsing that bright hair again.
“Hmm? Oh. Yeah.” My hand went to the dragonfly around my neck, the silver warm now from lying against my skin. “Just picked it up this afternoon.”
“Looks nice.” He raised a hand as though he was going to touch it, but he changed the movement to a gesture in the pendant’s direction instead, shoving his hands in the front pockets of his jeans. “Means change.”
“What?”
“The dragonfly.” He nodded in the direction of my cleavage, current resting place of said dragonfly. “In a lot of cultures the dragonfly symbolizes change.”
“Oh.” I wasn’t that deep, and for a moment I felt a little ashamed of that. But the hell with it. I shrugged. “To me, it symbolizes pretty.” He laughed, a real laugh this time, and I couldn’t help but remember that frisson of dissatisfaction that had seized me when I’d first picked it up. Time for a change, I’d said to Simon. Huh. Maybe this dragonfly knew what it was talking about.
I opened my mouth to tell Daniel about this, but he’d already turned his attention back to his cousins on the stage. Not for the first time, I contemplated the MacLean DNA. Dex and Daniel were both tall, but that was where the resemblance ended. Dex was dark, solid, and strong-muscled, a man who looked like he was about to rock your world in a dangerous way. Daniel was lean and fair, with bottle-green eyes to go with that red hair, and more of a swimmer’s build than a bodybuilder’s. Daniel looked less like he was about to rock your world and more like he knew exactly how you took your coffee and would bring it to you in bed with a soft smile just for you. While the Kilts played the Faire, Daniel stuck around to man their merchandising booth. It didn’t seem like enough to keep him busy, but maybe Dex and the others required that much supervision.
Daniel was a comfortable, easy presence, but I always felt a little awkward around him, since I was pretty sure he knew all about Dex and me. There’d been that one night this summer when I’d run into Daniel at the hotel ice machine at two in the morning. There’d been no explaining that away.
Sure enough. “You . . . Um.” Daniel cleared his throat, and I glanced over. His eyes were still on the stage, but his mouth twisted as he bit the inside of his cheek. “You know about Dex, right?”
I blinked. “Well, I’m familiar with him.” Very familiar, but he probably wasn’t looking for details.
He shook his head and leaned a shoulder against a tree, hands still shoved in the front pockets of his jeans. “I mean, you know he’s . . .” He sighed and turned those green eyes my way. “You know he’s kind of a player, right?”
“A wench at every Faire?” I raised my eyebrow, and his laugh in response was more of a snort. “I’d heard that.” I sighed a dramatic sigh and looked back at the stage. “Guess I’m not as special as I thought.”
I’d meant that as a joke, but Daniel didn’t respond. I turned my head, expecting a knowing smirk on his face, but instead a flush crept up the back of his neck as he studied the ground. “I didn’t say . . .” He cleared his